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been—lovely, demanding, and irresistible. Irresistible even to Xavier, Baron de Chavigny— and he had long been regarded as one of the most elusive bachelors in Europe.
    When he first went to America, in 1912, to open the Fifth Avenue showrooms of the de Chavigny jewelry empire, Xavier instantly became the toast of the East Coast. Society matrons vied for his attendance at their parties. They paraded their daughters before the handsome young man without subtlety or shame, and Xavier de Chavigny was charming, and attentive, and infuriatingly noncommittal.
    To East Coast mothers he embodied the advantages of Europe: he was electrifyingly handsome, highly inteUigent; he had perfect manners, a fortune, and an ancient title.
    To East Coast fathers, he had the additional advantage of a superb business head. This was no idle French aristocrat content to let his fortune dwindle away while he had a good time. Like most Frenchmen of his class, he understood the importance of land; he held on to, and built up, his already vast estates in France. Unlike most Frenchmen of his class, he had a thoroughly American taste for commerce. He built up the de Chavigny jewelry empire, founded by his grandfather in the nineteenth century, into the largest and most renowned enterprise of its kind, rivaled internationally only by Cartier. He enlarged, and improved, his vineyards in the Loire. He extended his investments into banking, steel production, and the diamond mines in South Africa, which provided the raw materials for de Chavigny jewelry—jewelry that had bedecked the crowned heads of Europe, and now bedecked the uncrowned heads of rich and discerning Americans.
    Oh yes, the East Coast fathers remarked in their clubs, de Chavigny was smart. He had American virtues as well as European ones. Sure, he called his racehorse trainer every morning, but he called his stockbrokers first.
    Xavier met Louise in London, when she was nineteen and he twenty-nine and she was being introduced to English society. It was late in 1914. Xavier had been wounded in the early months of the war, and—to his fury and disgust—released from active service. They met at one of the last great coming-out balls of the war years: she wearing a Worth dress of the palest pink silk; he wearing the uniform of a French officer. His leg wound had healed sufficiently to permit him to dance with her three times; he sat out three more dances with her. Next morning he presented himself to her father in their suite at Claridges with a proposal of marriage. It was accepted a decorous three weeks later.
    They were married in London, spent their honeymoon on the Suther-

    18 • SALLY BEAUMAN
    land estates in Scotland, and returned to Paris with their two-year-old son, Jean-Paul, at the end of the war. In Europe, Louise quickly became as celebrated for her charm, her taste, and her beauty as she had been in America. Their hospitality, their generosity, and their style became a byword on two continents. And the Baron de Chavigny proved to have one quality no one had expected in a Frenchman: he was a devoted, and entirely faithful, husband.
    So, seven years later, when Louise de Chavigny recovered from the difficult birth of her second son, and began to appear in society once more —to look, to charm, to dress just as she had always done—those who did not know her well assumed the charmed life continued. There had been a sad episode, a difficult period, but it was over. When, in 1927, the Baronne de Chavigny celebrated her return to Paris from Newport by purchasing Coco Chanel's entire spring collection, her female acquaintances smiled: Plus qa change, plus c'est la meme chose. . . .
    Those who knew her better—her aging parents, her husband, Jean-Paul, and the little boy whom she never nursed and infrequently saw—found another Louise. They found a woman whose capriciousness increased year by year, a woman given to swift and sometimes violent changes of mood, to sudden elation,